Divided against Yourselves (Spell Weaver) (17 page)

“Perhaps being able to talk to God made him wonder if he had been forgiven after all,” I suggested.

Stan raised an eyebrow at that.

“Later, dude,” I continued, knowing it wasn’t really safe to discuss that subject if David wasn’t completely merged with Stan yet. “Right now let’s get you home. It must be late.”

Nurse Florence glanced down at her watch. “It feels like three in the morning, but it’s really only ten at night.”

“That’s late enough for me!” I said. “Nurse Florence, thanks again. Can I—” I was about to say something like, “walk you to your car?” before I realized how ridiculous that would be.

“No, thank you, I’ll…see myself out,” replied Nurse Florence with a grin as she stepped toward the pond.

“Well, good night then,” I said, matching her grin.
“Could you perhaps manage a burning bush the next time we do this?”

“It’ll be on my to-do list,”
replied Nurse Florence as she stepped into the pond and then vanished into it. I had seen her do that several times, but I still couldn’t quite get used to it, even though the original Taliesin had certainly grown accustomed to it.

“OK, Stan, your mom probably has the bloodhounds out by now,” I said, sounding much cheerier than I felt.

“I planned ahead,” said Stan quickly. “I told her I might be spending the night. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen.”

“It’s always good to plan ahead. You want to stay over? I’m sure my parents wouldn’t mind.”

Stan considered for a minute. “You look like you need your sleep. I’d probably better go home.”

“OK, but in that case, I should walk you home.”

Stan started to protest but then thought better of it. He only lived three doors down, and he was far more capable of taking care of himself than he had been a year ago, so I’m not sure exactly why I insisted on walking him home. Maybe I was being overprotective. On the other hand, Stan had been close to getting killed more than once in the last few weeks, and Morgan Le Fay was on the loose, so perhaps my caution was warranted.

The walk turned out to be uneventful, and I was home before I knew it, and in bed almost before I knew it. In minutes I was so deep in sleep that I might have slept through a major earthquake—or at least until my alarm went off. Sadly, that was not to be.

It started with a dream. In this dream I woke up—you’ve dreamed of waking up at least once, right? Anyway, when I awoke, I realized someone was in bed with me. Illogically for real life but consistent with many of my recent dreams, I thought it was Carla. Then a chill passed through me and I stiffened. No, not like that—get your minds out of the gutter! I stiffened with fear, because I realized the other person was not Carla, despite the black hair. No, it was Morgan, staring at me by the moonlight that filtered in through my window and smiling invitingly.

My first impulse was to jump out of bed, but I suddenly realized I was naked. Odd—I was sure I had been wearing pajamas when I went to sleep. Oh, yeah, this was a dream. It had to be a dream, because Morgan couldn’t physically get into the house. I didn’t know she could dream-walk, but that must be what she was doing. I would have to remember to adjust the protection on the house to prevent that kind of thing in the future.

“I have gotten more enthusiastic welcomes,” observed Morgan, her smile broadening. “If you try to scramble any further away from me, you’ll fall right out of the bed. It’s chilly in here; come over, and warm me up.”

“Morgan,” I replied, striving for the most dignified tone I could manage under the circumstances, “what do you want from me? I’m pretty sure it isn’t sex.”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” said Morgan, leering at me as if she had x-ray vision and was looking right through the sheet and blankets. Fortunately, the ancient Celts had not conceived of x-ray vision, and Morgan was not that much of an innovator when it came to magic.

“I know you,” I pointed out, “and you may have slept with many men, but never impulsively. You want something, or you wouldn’t be here, so you may as well just tell me what it is.”

“I want…many things,” she replied evasively, slowly but playfully sliding closer to me. I tried to get a little further away, but she was right—too much further, and I would fall out of bed.

“However, the thing I want the most, even a little more than your sweet body, is an agreement about Alcina.”

“I’m inclined to agree with Nurse Florence that separating Alcina from Carla would be pretty difficult, since they only have one soul between them,” I pointed out. “How would you solve that problem?” At this point I just managed to clamber out of bed, with a sheet around me, before Morgan could reach me.

Morgan hovered on the edge of the bed for a while, pretending to pout over my escape from the bed. Tiring of that in a short time, she continued. “Don’t be misled by the water witch’s dogma. Did she not also tell you your playmate Stan could not be a reincarnation of King David?”

The fact that Morgan had somehow learned of that conversation was problematic, but I kept my emotions from showing on my face. “That’s a little different,” I said.

“Is it? There are many people today who believe a soul can be split in two. And didn’t you discover two minds within Stan tonight? Don’t look so surprised; you forgot to extend your protection to the green space behind your house. Anyway, didn’t you?”

“Two minds are a very different situation than two souls. As far as I can tell, when someone’s past-life memories are awakened, the human brain, not knowing what to do with the new information, treats each set of memories as if it were a separate mind. Really, there is still only one mind.”

“Then David was just an illusion? If you believe that, why was it so hard for you to banish him?”

Well, she had a point there.

“You know that mentally David is just as real as you or I. Can you really think he doesn’t have a soul?”

“I’m sure he has a soul. The problem is that it is the same soul Stan has.”

Morgan sighed loudly. “What if I were willing to take all the risks. You could bind me with a
tynged
that would require me to leave forever if I was unable to provide Alcina with both a separate body and a separate soul.”

I had forgotten about the body part, yet another major problem. “You’re that sure you can manage both?” I asked.

Morgan dismissed the question with a wave of her hand. “If I were not sure, I would not be here.”

I was sorely tempted to propose an oath right at that moment, but the terms of it would require careful deliberation. Besides, since I knew the reversal spell myself, I didn’t need to make an agreement with Morgan to get Carla back; given enough other casters, I could bring Carla back without her, suppressing Alcina in the process. However, the moment Morgan realized that I would not make a deal with her, she would become a major threat to everyone I loved, maybe even to everyone I knew. Again, I needed to at least pretend to be interested.

“I would need time to work out the terms,”

“As would I,” Morgan cut in.

“As would we both then. Let us meet again in a week or so—in more business-like circumstances.”

“Oh, where is the fun in that?” asked Morgan in mock seriousness. “You were not such a prude when you were Taliesin the bard.” With that, she rose from the bed, without anything wrapped around her, presumably to show me what I was missing. Apparently, I was missing a lot… Had I not been in love with poor, comatose Carla, I might almost have succumbed to Morgan’s considerable charms.

“I see from the way you grip your sheet that we will not be making love tonight, Taliesin. Never fear, though—that night will come. We will talk again in a week…though I cannot guarantee the more business-like part. With a wave of her arm, Morgan faded into the moonlight and was gone.

I woke up the moment she stopped dream-walking me, badly tangled up in the sheets, but otherwise unscathed. I glanced over at the clock. Damn! It was only two o’clock in the morning, too early for a cold shower. Too bad—at this point I could really have used one!

CHAPTER 7: TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE

I got up in the morning thinking that at least today couldn’t be worse than yesterday. Then I almost slapped myself because whenever I thought something like that, the day found a way to become worse than the previous one.

Breakfast was even stranger than it had been yesterday. Mom talked at some length about dreaming there was an intruder in the house. I could tell Dad was becoming concerned. If I hadn’t known the truth myself, I might have been concerned too. She kept prefacing her remarks with, “I’m sure I’m being silly,” but she still sounded a little paranoid anyway. I almost dropped my spoon when she started talking about what the intruder in her dreams looked like—and described Morgan almost exactly!

I wanted to reassure her and my dad. Damn it, I wanted to tell them the truth, but I knew I couldn’t. The most I could do was hug my mom extra hard on the way out the door. Somehow, that didn’t seem like enough.

My walk to school with Stan was no better. He was quiet and obviously nervous.

“Stan? You aren’t holding out on me again?”

“Nothing new has happened,” he replied too quickly and too defensively.

I made a practice of not trying to read people’s minds unless absolutely necessary. Well, if Stan was already having trouble again, I needed to know it, so as we walked along, I infiltrated his mind, subtly probing for information.

His mind was still welded to David’s, but the welds already looked less substantial to me than they had last night. I could see the equivalent of hairline cracks on some of them. I couldn’t understand why the situation was changing so fast, especially now that David was trying to be cooperative. I strengthened the joining as much as I could without tipping him off that I was rummaging around in his head. Nurse Florence and I would need to reinforce the connection between him and David—and soon.

I looked for a moment at my own mind, but there was no sign of the degradation so obviously present in Stan’s. I could only see one mind, my own, without even an echo from any of my past lives. Sure, I had their memories and skills if I concentrated hard enough, but they were no longer separate entities and had not been since I managed to merge them four years ago. The integration was seamless. No other mind reader could ever tell that my mind had once been shattered into hundreds of past selves. If I had mended mine so well, why couldn’t I do the same for Stan?

That question continued to nag at me all morning. I stopped by Nurse Florence’s office during nutrition, but naturally she couldn’t solve the problem either.

“Tal, you can show me Stan’s mind, but you’re the expert on how to deal with past selves. I wouldn’t really know what I was looking at.”

“Is there anyone else who might help?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“I’m afraid this is such a new problem I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

“Do you think Stan’s condition supports Morgan’s theory that a soul can be split?”

Well, that got her attention. Switching immediately to mental communication, she said,
“I thought you were just pretending to entertain the possibility to fool Morgan. You aren’t telling me Stan has two souls in him, are you?”

“I can’t really see souls, only minds. He has two minds in him, and I know from last night that they won’t merge easily. Maybe that means that each mind is connected to a separate soul.”
Suddenly, I wanted to believe Morgan, at least on that issue. Because if somehow Stan and David had two separate souls, perhaps David’s could be extracted from Stan and sent to whatever afterlife awaited David.

“The soul can’t be split,”
asserted Nurse Florence emphatically.
“And if it could, wouldn’t it be evil to do it? What possible good could such a thing bring?”

“Morgan dream-walked me last night and suggested a tynged that would let her try her theory and then force her into exile forever if her experiment failed.”

“It’s a trick. Tal, you know who we are dealing with better than I. You know the role she played in bringing down Camelot. We both know how she allied with Ceridwen to destroy us all. Tell me you are not actually considering working with her.”

“I’m not really. What I want is to revive Carla without Morgan being anywhere close. The only reason I’m having second thoughts is what is happening to Stan. I can’t seem to put him together correctly even with David cooperating. How am I going to be able to heal Carla if Alcina, who probably won’t cooperate, is as powerful as Morgan says? And even if I can, we still have Morgan to deal with afterward.”

“Agreed. Vanora has an idea about that.”
It would be hard for me to accept any of Vanora’s ideas, and Nurse Florence knew that, but she kept going anyway.
“She believes the safest approach is to take Carla to the Order’s headquarters in Wales. There we can attempt the reversal spell with a number of other spell casters to reinforce our attempts. And if you can’t heal Carla appropriately right away, she will stay with the Order until you can. Our headquarters is far easier to defend than the hospital is, and it is likely Morgan won’t even know Carla is there.”

“What about Carla’s family, and the staff at the hospital?”